Piano Works

Berit Johansen Tange

“Breathlessly, to the point of madness, like a wondrous reunion” … The expressive instructions, the evocative titles and the ecstatic sounds of Rued Langgaard's piano works reflect the composer's desperate longing to transcend the boundaries of our world. Yet Langgaard's Romantic striving was always filtered through his own modern consciousness to create sonorities that are as fascinating as they are unmistakably Langgaard.

A single strand runs from the first small piano pieces that Rued Langgaard composed around the year 1900 - before the age of ten - until the last works composed around 50 years later. Throughout the years he was preoccupied with evoking a world different from the immediately accessible one we know. For Langgaard, music was above all a medium that granted access to some realm beneath the veil of appearances. In some cases he tried to express an ideal dream-world; in others the unconscious with its night-black shadows was permitted to break through.

For Rued Langgaard this transcendence of the boundaries of a different reality was of crucial importance; music was not just aesthetic expression but a manifestation of the spirit that gave life meaning. In other words, Langgaard paid homage to a view of art where the life of the individual is interpreted as part of a greater existential context. This is why so much is invested in Rued Langgaard's music. With the aid of the musical notes he embarks on a quest, and since the prize can never quite be grasped, it is the drive towards ‘the Other' that becomes the real meaning and content of the work of art. Often this results in ecstatic music.

In the works on this CD this is heard at its most extreme in Vanvidsfantasi (Insanity Fantasy) and Hél-Sfærernes Musik (The Music of the Hél-Spheres), where the ecstatic leads to madness and collapse. In the little early mood-piece Nat paa Sundet (Night on the Sound) the ecstatic just bubbles under the surface. In the grand-scale Fantasy Sonata, on the other hand, the ecstatic comes to full expression in a series of stormy passages that are only resolved towards the end, when Langgaard introduces a Celestial Voice\. Besides the ecstatic, the celestial also plays an important role in the ten Gitanjali Hymns. In two cases Heaven is actually mentioned in the titles of the pieces.

At the same time the Gitanjali Hymns are coloured by a profound longing that gives the music a vibrant, searching tone. As early as the first piece Langgaard has expressed this with an exhortatory character description: \\Breathlessly, to the point of madness, like a wondrous reunion.\\ In this case the ecstatic points forward to an insight into something marvellous, and in the last piece, Gyldne Strømme (Golden Streams), the music rises in a great concluding motion which must be played with a character of \\Ecstasy, becoming more and more moved.\\

The Works

The title of Langgaard's ten Gitanjali Hymns comes from the Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore's (1861-1941) poetry collection Gitanjali (1910). In 1913 Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and that same year Gitanjali appeared in a Danish translation that was printed in several thousand copies in the course of the next few years. Gitanjali means \\song-offerings\\ or \\offerings that are sung\\, and the total of 103 poems pay tribute to the universe and the divine power that binds everything together.

By calling his Gitanjali pieces \\hymns\\ Langgaard has stressed the religiosity in Tagore's lyrical universe, since hymns are traditionally sung in praise of gods. In this case they are songs without words, since the texts are not sung, but can instead be read in the poems by Tagore to which Langgaard refers in the titles of the individual pieces.

This is clearest in the third Gitanjali Hymn, which is called Den fjerne Sang (The Far-Away Song). In it Langgaard quotes a passage from the 21st poem, which says: \\Do you not feel a thrill passing through the air with the notes of the far-away song floating from the other shore?\\. The poem describes the sound of the kingdom of the dead, which can be heard by a voyager launching his boat in the water to sail across with a \\burden of faded futile flowers\\. This is a quiet lament, dominated in purely musical terms by a descending melodic fragment that must be played semplice con amarezza (simply, with bitterness). Quite simple means are used to express the resigned state of emptiness that the dying person experiences before his life's last journey.

In the sixth Gitanjali Hymn, Himmel-Ensom-hed (Sky Solitude), one senses painful resignation, but in contrast to The Far-Away Song the music is not static. Now and then the sighing, descending melody lines are interrupted by upward-striving note sequences that create an inner tension in the music, thus also giving expression to the contrasting forces that characterize Tagore's poem, where a lone human being stands face to face with God under the vault of the heavens.

In long passages Tagore's poems and Langgaard's music represent dream-states rather than progressive action. Thus they run counter to the normal perception of time, with its continuing sequence of logically successive events. Instead the music and poems unfold visions that are manifested without warning and open up new chambers of consciousness by leaps and bounds.

One of the best examples of this is the eighth Gitanjali Hymn, Tavshedens Hav (The Sea of Silence), which is based on a sentence from the last of Tagore's poems: \\Let all my songs gather together their diverse strains into a single current and flow to a sea of silence.\\ It is telling that Langgaard does not choose to express the heady character of the text in a similar musical form. Instead he chooses a meditative idiom characterized by subdued repetitive motion that is to be played \\Quietly and tearfully\\. Towards the end, the piece breaks into a quiet funeral march, but all in all it is not gloomy music. On the contrary, this music lives its own peaceful life beyond the relentlessly grinding mill-wheel of time; and with the last bright major chord the music transcends this mood in silent bliss.

One result of the all-embracing love of the universe that Tagore expresses in the poems is that nature is worshipped as something close and intimate. In Langgaard's music this leads to a number of very sensual nature images, most clearly in Sommerhvisken (Summer Whisper) and Regnfulde Blade (Rainy Leaves). In Summer Whisper Langgaard abandons himself to an enchanted midsummer night scene where Mendelssohn's light spirit can be sensed. On the other hand, Rainy Leaves is burdened by a painful awareness of the individual's separation from the world. In Tagore this is described as a \\pang of separation\\, and it is expressed most sensitively by Langgaard's tone-painting of the raindrops falling on the rustling leaves.

In Himlen sukker (The Sky Groans) and Sejl-færd (Sailing) this sorrow erupts in despairing emotion. A few notes are intensely accentuated, and the affinity between the two pieces is underscored by the way Langgaard uses the same fourth-theme in both, hammered out in a defiantly ascending motion. In Sailing this actually produces a stately feeling that creates a strong impression in its interplay with Tagore's words: \\now I am eager to die into the deathless.\\

Romantic death-longing is in fact the underlying force that binds Langgaard's ten Gitanjali Hymns together. Only in the last definitive encounter with God is the questing soul redeemed in earnest. This is not to say that this music is life-denying. It is first and foremost beauty-seeking, and in Den hvileløse Vind (The Restless Wind) this is experienced in its purest and most consummate form. Here all of the expression concentrates on following the searching soul's flight through the world, and in the last Gitanjali Hymn, Golden Streams, contact is finally made with a divine reality. In Tagore's words, the morning will come and \\thy voice pour down in golden streams breaking through the sky.\\ Here, with virtuoso piano writing, Langgaard grants the soul transcendence with bravura. And yet ... after a grandiose climax the piece and the work die out in a few quiet chords with the character \\estinto\\ (extinguished/deceased). In a liberating emptiness.

In January and February 1916, when Rued Langgaard composed Fantasy Sonata,he was in the middle of his‘Lieder years'. Around 120 songs appeared in 1913-18, including a number with texts by Heinrich Heine. One of these was Lehn deine Wang, which Langgaard composed in the very period when he was working on Fantasy Sonata. Lehn deine Wang must have had a special meaning, for not only did he choose musical motifs from the song in the large piano work; he also noted the text of Heine's love poem above the melody notes in the first large section of the piano piece. Words and notes match well, so one can easily sing or recite the text while the sonata is being played.

Although it is not the intention that one should hear Heine's text, it gives an impression of the thoughts that lie behind the music. Langgaard has already emphasized that Fantasy Sonata should be played \\molto agitato e con passione\\. This is underscored by the way the music in the introductory main section is notated like a rushing stream surging up and down, given a restlessly searching character by the suddenly shifting stresses. Above this troubled sea of music floats a calm, beautifully formed melody, with which Heine's poem is associated:

When the flood of our tearsFlows as one in this great flame,And when my arms firmly enfold you -I will die of love-longing.(Lyrical intermezzofrom Heinrich Heine: Buch der Lieder)

The strong death-longing that grips Heine's poem runs like an undercurrent through all of Langgaard's Fantasy Sonata. It leaves its mark on the great introductory main section and two corresponding sections later in the work; the fundamental character is restless and agitated, and this is further underscored by a character description as \\Furioso\\ and remarks added in the manuscript such as \\The treble must scold!\\ and \\Piano assault\\. This is not just a matter of animated music, but rather of a drive towards self-destruction and collapse. Langgaard was fully aware of this, as expressed for example by a motto that he associated with Fantasy Sonata:

The clouds are trailing, the stars are fading!Away there, away there! From far and away thereHe comes there, our brother, he comes there - - - Death.(From the midnight scene in the last act of Goethe's Faust.)

Langgaard's Fantasy Sonata is closely related to the first movement of Robert Schumann's 80-year-older Fantasie opus 17. Apart from the titles, this is expressed among other ways by the musical character, since C major plays a crucial role in both works, and since both composers associated text quotations with the music. Throughout his life Schumann played an important role for Langgaard. Even as a child he played many of Schumann's piano works, and Schumann's Fantasie was something Langgaard had a particularly close relationship with. This can be seen for example from a diary entry of 1st April 1924: \\Nothing! Sun comes up and sun goes down. That is all. Play Schumann's Fantasy in despair.\\

At that time the mood in his childhood home was oppressive. His mother Emma Langgaard was weakened by illness, and Rued Langgaard was experiencing a personal and artistic crisis which led to a radical change in his music in this period. Later, Langgaard's relationship with Schumann developed into a kind of identification. Schumann's spiritual and sometimes mentally torn music spoke strongly to Langgaard, and Schumann's tragic fate with his suicide attempts and increasing madness was something in which Langgaard very much saw himself reflected, inasmuch as in the last years of his life he experienced increasing human and artistic isolation in the provincial city of Ribe.

With his use of Heine's poem Lehn deine Wang, Langgaard gives direct expression to the link with Schumann, since Schumann too wrote a song with this text (op. 142 no. 2). The musical affinity between the two fantasies is mainly felt in the fact that both are highly imaginative works with an agitatedly passionate tone. Yet the aim of Schumann's music is more specifically passionate, as the first movement of his Fantasie was written with his beloved Clara Wieck in mind. Since a true love relationship between the two was prevented at the time when Schumann composed his fantasia, he expressed his love-longing through the music.

A motto by the romantic German poet Friedrich Schlegel speaks of a faint note that can only be heard by someone who listens in secrecy. And with a quotation from Beethoven's song cycle An die ferne Geliebte at the end of the fantasia, it is clear who this music is addressed to.

But this is less clear in Langgaard's case, for with the Goethe motto Langgaard makes death a theme, but at the same time the passionate music is evidence that great emotions are in play. The key to the riddle is to be found in a quotation from another of Langgaard's own songs, which is heard several times during the Fantasy Sonata. The quotation, which is dominated by a descending melody line, comes from the song Ved Kyrkhult Kirke (At Kyrkhult Church). The theme is heard a total of three times in longish passages as a thought-provoking memento in the agitated stream of notes.

Ved Kyrkhult Kirke, which begins with the words \\Hear you the sound of the hymn sung in there?\\ was composed in Copenhagen in October 1915 when Rued Langgaard was thinking of the small town of Kyrkhult in Blekinge, Sweden, where he had stayed in the summer of 1913. In that very summer he experienced what was probably the only time in his life he fell in love. The girl was called Dora, and the love he felt appears to have been a watershed in Langgaard's life, for later he returned in several works to the events of that summer.

His love did not result in a happy relationship. On the contrary, Langgaard abandoned himself to an effusive religiosity, as is also the case in Fantasy Sonata. This highly-strung passionate music is not resolved on its own terms. Instead a transformation takes place. After a concluding passage typified by the quotation from Ved Kyrkhult Kirke Langgaard introduces a brand new element in the score: a so-called \\Celestial Voice\\, which is accompanied by quiet, ceremonial steps.

The \\Celestial Voice\\ is like an answer to the question \\Hear you the sound of the hymn sung in there?\\, indirectly formulated by means of the quotation from Ved Kyrkhult Kirke. Lang-gaard himself wrote the text of the song, which takes its point of departure at the graves in a churchyard. There - close to the dead - the hymn-singing is heard behind the walls of the church, and the life-weary Langgaard, in the throes of unrequited love, finds his own resolution.

In the end the music transcends this, as it is split into opposite motions which include both a heaven-aspiring scale and an extended descent towards the depths, before it all ends with a bright-sounding C major chord - perhaps a nod to Schumann's C major Fantasie.

Rued Langgaard had a dramatic imagination. While still a child he cultivated melodramatic subjects. In small tales written in school exercise books, and in piano pieces, he often depicted death scenes, accidents and images of ruin. As an example, the death of King Christian IX on 29th January 1906 made a strong impression on the twelve-year-old Rued Langgaard. In his diary he describes in detail the course of the King's last hours, and on the same day he composes a funeral march for piano - in no less than two versions. In other pieces with titles like Paa en Kirkegaard ved Nat (In a Churchyard at Night) and Graven (The Grave) one senses that the very young Langgaard is particularly attracted to doom-laden, eerie scenes. He can also come in on a dramatic situation with journalistic acuity; for example in the tale When the Ship Went Down, where Langgaard, in a shudderingly realistic style, describes the struggle for life of the distressed passengers in the waves after a passenger steamer has sunk on a stormy night.

Although these stories and piano pieces unfold in the small format, they are typified by considerable pathos. And the same is true of Night on the Sound, composed by the 13-year-old Rued Langgaard. With a dark-sounding piano texture, painfully descending melody lines and an ominous tremolo in the lowest bass notes of the piano, the young composer gives the little piece a tragic feel. All in all, an effective piece of highly-strung art that gives us a good picture of the emotional intensity that was to follow Rued Langgaard for the rest of his life.

The demonic and the mystical were part of Rued Langgaard's artistic make-up, and the darkness increased as the years passed. This comes to full expression in The Music of the Hél-Spheres, which he composed one night at the end of December 1948. The Music of the Hél-Spheres is at the opposite pole from the major work of thirty years earlier, The Music of the Spheres, for whereas Langgaard at the end of The Music of the Spheres created a modern idiom to express Antiquity's representation of cosmic harmony, in The Music of the Hél-Spheres he descends into the underworld. In Norse mythology Hél is the realm of the dead, and to underscore the gloom, Langgaard has added a motto by Jenny Blicher-Clausen(1865-1907): \\I ran through the streets. The horror whipped me on.\\ The quotation is from Blicher-Clausen's once very popular work Violin. A Present-Day Poem (1900), where a nocturnal race against death is described in dramatic terms.

But in this case it is not a remote literary figure's night-ride that is described. It is Langgaard himself who is the protagonist. In the manuscript he has written with excited pen-strokes \\composed 4.15 in morning 28/12/48 (After morning walk. 3 o'clock! Always!)\\. As Langgaard began to feel more and more isolated, he became more and more of a night-owl. Since he attracted attention with his very appearance, he preferred to walk the streets of Ribe at night rather than in broad daylight. The desolate night of the cathedral city thus gradually became a kind of setting for Langgaard's works, since he increasingly composed in the hours after his nightly excursions.

In The Music of the Hél-Spheres Langgaard has also written himself into the musical material, since he used his personal ‘fate symbol' to great dramatic effect: a descending B flat major seventh chord. The Music of the Hél-Spheres consists of just 21 bars, to be played \\over and over again\\ at an \\increasingly insane tempo\\. At the end, before it is repeated once more, we hear the four notes of the B flat major seventh chord hammered out without accompaniment. Like merciless blows, the four notes put an end to the sporadic approaches to musical development of the preceding bars. At the same time, these very notes are the culmination of a progression that can best be described as building up to a frenzy. The music is divided against itself and moves by virtue of the more and more frantic tempo towards its own ruin. And in the end Langgaard himself is included in the fall, personified by the four notes.

In purely musical terms The Music of the Hél--Spheres is extremely modern music. In this case Langgaard is not - as in many other cases - looking back to his beloved Romanticism; instead, with this self-destructive music, he is at the leading edge of Absurdism, which made a particular impact in the theatre of the 1950s. The meaninglessness is the meaning, and at the centre of the artwork stands a torn human being - in Langgaard's case also a human being in profound personal crisis. On top of his traumatizing experience of feeling like a pariah in the musical world came considerable religious scruples.

The Music of the Hél-Spheres was originally intended as the concluding piece in a suite called X Mood Hysteria from Ordruphøj (Gala religiosa). Langgaard is referring to St. Andrew's College at Ordruphøj north of Copenhagen, where he had contacts in 1927 with a Jesuit order. Rued Langgaard showed on several occasions that he was attracted to the Catholic Church, and this apparently led to a religious experience of a mystical nature at Ordruphøj. Langgaard does not provide a more detailed description of this experience, but the very name of the suite, and the fact that an event more than twenty years in the past could form the basis for a new kind of music, testify to the great significance that the encounter with the Catholic Church had for Langgaard.

With the emphasis on madness and ruin, The Music of the Hél-Spheres joins the group of apocalyptic works that Langgaard created. But while he had earlier, in The Music of the Spheres and in Antichrist, made the Apocalypse part of the creation of a new world, The Music of the Hél-Spheres stands entirely under the shadow of annihilation.

In Insanity Fantasy from 1947 Rued Langgaard harks back to his Fantasy Sonata of more than thirty years earlier, since the first movement of Insanity Fantasy is a short-of-breath version of the large Fantasy Sonata. The two pieces illustrate a radical development. The young Langgaard's music unfolds over long stretches with romantic eloquence, while in the last part of his life he developed a succinct, pithy style where things are brought to a head. The individual sections are made to come directly up against one another, thus stressing the clash rather than the continuity.

In the first long passages of Insanity Fantasy, Langgaard requires the pianist to have the pedal pressed down continuously, so that the music is enveloped in a fog of sonorities consisting of all the notes of the piano. At the same time the movement is typified by rhythmic displacements and violent emphases on particular notes, which breaks down any fixed metre and instead makes the music flow together in a stream of notes where it is hard to make out form and structure. As in a psychosis - or state of insanity - things can no longer be distinguished.

As in Fantasy Sonata, the first movement of Insanity Fantasy is coloured by quotations from Langgaard's own songs, Lehn deine Wang and Ved Kyrkhult Kirke. The meaning of these songs is underscored towards the end, when they are tied closely together in a kind of epilogue. First we hear the theme from Lehn deine Wang in a brief, caricatured version where the once beautifully formed melody for Heine's love poem is replaced by aggressively chopped-out chords - as if Langgaard wanted to sneer at the sensitivity he had earlier associated with the theme. But after this the expression changes radically and without warning, as the first notes of Ved Kyrkhult Kirke are played in a faint nuance (piano) and with the character Lento religioso alla organo.

Despite the growing imbalance in Langgaard's mind and music in the last years of his life, he still tries to make the connection with the romantic religiosity of his youth when, in the last dream-like notes, he quotes the theme \\Hear you the sound of the hymn sung in there?\\ from the Kyrkhult Church song. The church is still a mental sanctuary for Langgaard, but at the same time it is a framework for demonic forces when Ribe Cathedral, via its links with Bonn (see \\Events in the life of Rued Langgaard\\, 1947) confirms Langgaard's experience of a spiritual affinity with Schumann. Viewed in this light Insanity Fantasy can be perceived as Langgaard's attempt to forge a link with the spirit of Schumann.

The last creative period of Schumann's life was of particular interest to Langgaard. In a letter written six months before the composition of Insanity Fantasy Langgaard speaks of a \\strange psychic state\\ that held Schumann in its grip in the time before the same state \\drove him to madness in February 1854 and in the end led slowly to his early, mysterious death on 29th July 1856 in Bonn\\. Langgaard must have had this very state in mind when he composed the second movement of Insanity Fantasy. The title is Efteraarsengel (Autumn Angel), and the movement consists of a theme with variations. The theme is an adaptation of music that Schumann thought he had heard sung by a nocturnal angel, just a week before he tried to take his own life by throwing himself into the winter cold of the Rhine.

In Langgaard's version, Schumann's angelic music has an inwardly serene feel. In the next variation, which has the character of a free improvisation, the theme is ‘glorified' by a series of harp-like melismas that elevate the music into a different sphere, and in conjunction with the title, Autumn Angel, the latent death-longing of the work appears in a radiant light.

In the last variation, yet another dimension is added when Langgaard introduces a so-called \\Melodia interna\\ in the form of one of his own songs, Melody from 1914. The melody line is placed down in the mid-range of the piano, so that it does in fact function as an internal melody in the subdued piano texture. At the same time Langgaard underpins the religious meaning of the music, since the text of Melody speaks of a pair of deep brown eyes that have no awareness of earthly love, but which have \\the dream-vision of Heaven as their object\\. Here too Langgaard's attitude to erotic love is typified by resignation. On the other hand, with Autumn Angel he directs a longing gaze at a celestial world beyond.

In the last movement, Vanvidsgang (Running Mad), all illusions are shattered. Here no scope is left for any other musical or mental reality. The movement is one long pianistic tour de force full of continuous eruptions of energy and fits of madness that gradually lead to claustrophobia and mental collapse. Existence has been cut loose from all ties, and can now plunge into a free fall that includes both exalted joy and frantic automatism; a searing image of a man on a collision course with himself and his surroundings.